I want to conclude with a myth about identity and
boundaries which might inform late twentieth-century political imaginations
(Plate 1). I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley,
James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre. These
are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech
worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring conceptions of bodily
boundaries and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970)
should be credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body
imagery is to world view, and so to political language.French feminists like Luce Irigaray and
Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave
eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially
for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.

American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde,
and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations -- and
perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political
language. They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But
their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist
paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval’s terms
as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would
simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of
late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are
also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities
inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine
and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity
of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric
possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political
“technological” pollution? I look briefly at two overlapping groups of texts
for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth:
constructions of women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science
fiction.

Earlier I suggested that “women of colour” might be
understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions
of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her
“biomythography,” Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material
and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures the tone
in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider
is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female and feminized, are supposed to
regard as the enemy preventing their solidarity, threatening their security.
Onshore, inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a
potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for
division, competition, and exploitation in the same industries. “Women of
colour” are the preferred labour force for the science-based industries, the
real women for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics
of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired in the
sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools,
educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English,
distinguishes the “cheap” female labour so attractive to the multinationals.

Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the “oral
primitive,” literacy is a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black
women as well as{175} men through
a history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and writing. Writing
has a special significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial
to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures,
primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently to the erosion of that
distinction in “postmodernist” theories attacking the phallo-centrism of the
West, with its worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and
singular work, the unique and perfect name. Contests for the meanings of
writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play
of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are
repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this time
that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be
about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before
language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to
survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing
the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.

The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that
reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling
origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western
culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing
for fulfillment in apocalypse. The phallocentric origin stories most crucial
for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies -- technologies
that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics -- that have recently
textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg
stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert
command and control.

Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the
struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power
in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings
of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo “bastard”
race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry
special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in
Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never
possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided
in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so
cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural
names, mother’s or father’s. Moraga’s writing, her superb literacy, is
presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche’s mastery of
the conqueror’s language -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that
allows survival. Moraga’s language is not “whole”; it is self-consciously
spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror’s languages. But it
is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before {176}
violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of
colour. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because
of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to
write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable
apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined to be the
innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of
appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moraga’s body, affirms it as the body
of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked
category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of “original
illiteracy” of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve
before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the
Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallocentric Family of Man.

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched
surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for
language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code
that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism.
That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing
in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings
which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire,
the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the
structure and modes of reproduction of “Western” identity, of nature and
culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. “We” did not
originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and
epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications
of “texts.”

From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to
ground politics in “our” privileged position of the oppression that
incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the
ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms
and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to
construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of
oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and
greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common
language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile “masculine”
separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged
reading or salvation history, to recognize “oneself” as fully implicated in the
world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard
parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches
about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche.
Women of colour have transformed her from the evil mother of {177} masculinist
fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival.

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal
transformation. Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges
the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation,
separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into
writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom
of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics --rebirth
without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either
better or worse off, but all agree they have less selflhood, weaker individuation,
more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But
there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route
that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its
imaginary. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate
cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of
victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who
refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a ”western” commentator
remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in
by “Western” technology, by writing. These real-life cyborgs (for example, the
Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and US electronics firms described
by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies.
Survival is the stakes in this play of readings.

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of
domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals -- in short,
domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.
Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature,
male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part,
agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion,
total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows
that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future,
who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the
autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God;
but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of
apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear
boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing
ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human
and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that
resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal
discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework
economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids,
mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems,
communications {178}devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological
separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and
organic. The replicant Rachael in the Ridley
Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear,
love, and confusion.

One consequence is that our sense of connection to our
tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has
become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics
and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense
experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices. Anne
McCaffrey’s pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the
consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl’s brain and complex machinery, formed
after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment,
skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the
skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the
seventeenth century until now, machines could be animated -- given ghostly
souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development
and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized -- reduced to body
understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are
obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines
can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don’t need
organic holism to give impermeable wholeness, the total woman and her feminist
variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial reading of
the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group of texts, feminist science
fiction.

The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very
problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artifact, member of a race,
individual entity, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these
fictions is not largely based on identification. Students facing Joanna Russ
for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like
James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The
Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the
reader’s search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic
quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the
story of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken
together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or
remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R.
Delany, especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing
the neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization
to subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was
regarded as particularly manly until her “true” gender was revealed, tells
tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of
generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing. John Varley {179}
constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad
goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surface an
extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes
of an African sorceress pitting her powers of transformation against the
genetic manipulations of her rival (Wild Seed), of time warps that bring
a modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white
master-ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth (Kindred),
and of the illegitimate insights into identity and community of an adopted
cross-species child who came to know the enemy as self (Survivor). In Dawn
(1987), the first installment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler
tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose
personal name recalls Adam’s first and repudiated wife and whose family name
marks her status as the widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A
black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the
transformation of humanity through genetic exchange with extra-terrestrial
lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earth’s habitats after
the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with
them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear
politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and
gender.

Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions,
Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of
promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics
of embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is “simply”
human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver,
can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs
to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her
kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transformations are effected by virus
vectors carrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants
of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Laenea
becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations
allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul
survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a
time sense that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole
species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of
communicating experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and
intimacy even in this world of protean transformation and connection.
Superluminal stands also for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in
another sense; it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and
colonial discourse in the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter.
This is a conjunction with a long history that many “First World” feminists
have tried to repress, including myself in my readings of Superluminal before
being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, {180} whose different location in the
world system’s informatics of domination made her acutely alert to the
imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including women’s science
fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily
McIntyre’s role as writer of the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV’s Star
Trek series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal.

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in
Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient
Greece established the limits of the centered polls of the Greek male human by
their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with
animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused
human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and
supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases -- all crucial to
establishing modern identity. The evolutionary and behavioral sciences of
monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century
industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite
different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane
fiction of Man and Woman.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the
imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are
maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not
innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so
generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes
irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense
pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of
embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated.
The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be
responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are
responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up until now (once upon a time),
female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment
seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being
out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses
that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might
consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment.
Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound
historical breadth and depth.

The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily
activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image.
Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women
more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged
epistemological position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this
claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the
ground of life. {181} But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of
women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men’s
access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart,
to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility
taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of
wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but
there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and
deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language
to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the
informatics of domination -- in order to act potently.

One last image: organisms and organismic, holistic politics
depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of
reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with
regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most
birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the
loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with
the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at
the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated,
potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not
rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream
of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in
this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake
that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second,
taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means
refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means
embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in
partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is
not just that science and technology are possible means of great human
satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can
suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies
and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a
powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in
tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right.
It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories,
relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I
would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

oIn “How To Suppress Women’s
Writing,” Joanna Russ writes, “Well, as in cells and
sprouts, growth occurs only at the edges of something. … But even to see the
peripheries, it seems, you have to be on them, or by an act of re-vision, place
yourself there. Refining and strengthening the judgments you already have will
get you nowhere. You must break set. It’s either that or remain at the center.
The dead, dead center.”

oLike Olympia
in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” or the female monster in Frankenstein,
Rachael is a
“replicant,” or simulated human, who grows up thinking that she is actually
human. The proof of her humanity consists only of photographs and other
souvenirs. That there is no true boundary between the replicant and human is
the main contention of both Blade Runner and the story that it is based
on: Phillip Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” Rachael is the love
object of the main character, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), who also
may or may not be a replicant himself, depending on whether you see the
Hollywood version or the director’s cut.

oLilith is found in the Gnostic Gospels,
the texts of the Christian tradition not authorized by the Catholic and, later,
the Protestant churches. She was the first wife of Adam, but not so happy as
Eve to be his “helpmeet,” she soon abandoned the Garden of Eden.According to myth, she takes her
revenge by inducing miscarriages in other women.

oCentaurs: “In Greek
mythology, a race of monsters believed to have inhabited the mountain regions
of Thessaly and Arcadia. They were usually represented as human down to the
waist, with the lower torso and legs of a horse. The centaurs were
characterized by savageness and violence; they were known for their drunkenness
and lust and were often portrayed as followers of Dionysus, the god of wine.”
From Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia.

oAmazons: “In Greek
mythology, a race of warlike women who excluded men from their society.” From Microsoft(R)
Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia.

oOur Bodies, Ourselves is a book
published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective that radicalized the
seventies feminist movement by encouraging women to take control of their
bodies. A sample from their recent updated edition reads: “Pregnancy and birth are
as ordinary as breathing, thinking, working, and loving, and as extraordinary
as a spectacular adventure into a new world. Our lives expand in all
dimensions. As we coordinate pregnancy, work, and family; as we labor, give
birth, and raise our children, we use our abundant capacities for creativity,
flexibility, resilience, determination, intuition, endurance, and humor. As
mothers and expectant mothers we are of all races and ethnicities. We are
biological mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and guardians of each
others’ children. We are heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian. We are teenagers,
young, and middle-aged. We have partners, are married, and are single. We have
disabilities. We have low, middle, and high incomes; we range from being homeless
to being financially wealthy. We live in cities, suburbs, villages, and the
countryside. We go to work and to school, and we work at home. Our pregnancies
are planned and unplanned. We have good prenatal care and poor prenatal care.
Some of us are unable to get any prenatal care at all. We give birth at home,
in birth centers, and in hospitals. We welcome our babies alone and surrounded
by family and friends. Whoever we are and however we become mothers, we deserve
to have the means to care for ourselves and our babies well. We deserve to feel
that we and our babies are welcome in our homes, our neighborhoods, and all the
institutions of our society.”

oThat invertebrates and other crawling, unformed creatures might
pose a viable fantasy for extremely masculine, “cyborg” imaginations as well,
see Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep (1939).The detective, Philip Marlowe, tells
the femme fatale, Mona Grant, “Don’t bother with bronze or silver
handles. And don’t scatter my ashes over the blue Pacific. I like worms better.
Do you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other
worm?” (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 191.